John Pursch lives in Tucson, Arizona. His work has appeared in many online literary journals and was recently nominated for the Sundress Best of the Net 2012 Anthology. His first book, Intunesia, is available from White Sky Books at http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/whiteskybooks. Follow @johnpursch on Twitter or subscribe/friend john.pursch on Facebook.

1 Comments:

When we speak or write, we communicate within human expectations: What we need from the other person or persons with whom we are communicating is expressed. The expectations of the other are foremost on the “mind” of the communicator. This is the ego-aspect of human communication. Verbal communication is our way of saying what we want, getting what we want.

It is difficult to comprehend that the relationship between truth and verbal communication is inverse. In mathematics, an inverse or negative relationship is one in which one variable, say y, decreases as another, say x, increases. For example, the volume of a gas is in inverse ratio to its pressure. Or, the further one drives a car, the less petrol one has in the tank.

The more and faster one speaks, with the idea of getting something that one wants from the world, the less we can understand what is really happening in the world. But we are not aware of this. We are blinded by the ego-aspects of language.

In these three prose poems, John Pursch subverts the relationship of ego-need and verbal communication designed to conform and cater to the other. We can experience his explosion of beautifully arbitrary language juxtapositions and, as they strike our sensibilities, we see language for what it is. Then we are able to see beyond -- to what is real, or what may be real.

Truth exists independent of our saying. Is it even possible to “say” the truth?

The poetry of John Pursch brings us to this insight and awareness. So pay attention, and listen, and you may experience (through the beauty of language) the bliss of being beyond and free of language.